[accord1999]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I'm starting to wonder if, the blitzkrrieg having failed, the Russians are now thinking that if they take it slow, the rest of the world will get bored and change the channel. Seems expensive, but I'm not sure why else they're taking their time.

People have lost perspective on how fast "blitzkrieg" really is.

Mechanized attacks are not always as rapid as attackers hope. Two of the quickest movements of armored forces in history—German general Heinz Guderian’s punch through the Ardennes and seizure of Dunkirk in May 1940, and the U.S. and coalition advance from the Kuwait border to Baghdad in 2003—each averagedapproximately 20 miles per day. Movement against a determined foe in winter conditions with limited daylight could reduce that rate of advance significantly.

Or how hard it is to take a giant city with determined defenders.

Urban Combat: While much of the terrain east of the Dnepr River includes rural fields and forests, there are several major urban areas that a Russian mechanized force would have to either take or bypass and besiege. Kiev has almost 3 million inhabitants, Kharkiv has roughly 1.5 million, Odessa has 1 million, Dnipro has almost 1 million, Zaporizhia has 750,000, and even Mariupol has almost 500,000. If defended, these large urban areas could take considerable time and casualties to clear and occupy. In the First Chechen War, it took Russian forces from December 31, 1994, to February 9, 1995, to wrestle control of Grozny, then a city of less than 400,000, from a few thousand Chechen fighters. In the Second Chechen War, the siege of Grozny also took six weeks.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia...vasion-ukraine